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I think this is one of many situations where the typical high-functioning individual underestimates how hard this kind of thing is for the median person, much less the actual underclass. The monetary costs, mental barriers, and organization required to simply move from California to Kansas while maintaining employment and arranging the housing transition well aren't trivial for most people. If someone has already pretty well cratered their situation by alienating a bunch of friends and getting evicted, there's no way they're smoothly making it to the storied paradise of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
If you're low functioning enough to struggle to maintain housing/job, that makes it easier to move, not harder. We're not talking about people who have an established career path or a mortgage or are pillars of their community. If you just lost your burger flipping job and are getting evicted and don't have any friends... Nothing is keeping you anywhere, other than inertia! Pack a suitcase and get on a bus.
(This is, of course, how a lot of people end up in California in the first place.)
It's very easy to forget how, for the lack of a better word, stupid a lot of people are. Most of us here are stuck in bubbles that are probably 1SD above the mean IQ. There are similarly-sized bubbles of people with mean IQ 1SD below the mean. You need to work in a DMV, a Walmart, an ER ward to see a more representative cross-section.
Someone who's IQ 85 can lead a relatively successful life, as long as it's stable. They have a bunch of recipes in their head: go to work, pay your bills, go grocery shopping, find a job that is similar to the old one, find an apartment that is similar to the old one. A thought like "even though the wages are lower in a town like Wichita than here in Frisco, the cost of living is so much lower that my discretionary income might even increase if I move there and continue working 25 hours a week in a fast food kitchen. Therefore, it might be prudent to cancel Netflix and start saving up to afford a move to a flyover state by the time my lease is up for renewal. Where should I move to? I should go on Facebook and see if any of my old acquaintances are willing to talk to me. Maybe one of them will even help me find a new apartment there" simply won't fit into their head.
Someone they trust has to break it down into digestible pieces, cram it into their head and come up with a new step-by-step recipe. If they don't have any relatives or friends to keep an eye out for them or they all are equally stupid, they will stop paying for their apartment, lose their job and end up in the streets.
You're talking to the wrong guy here, I've worked menial jobs before where they would honestly hire anyone with a pulse. My current job is physical labour and though it's more selective you do still wonder how some of the guys dress themselves in the morning. And I don't think it's necessarily stupidity here. There are plenty of dumb as bricks people who actually find life fairly simple so long as they remain on the rails for as long as possible. They're generally incredibly boring and safe and rarely end up as drug addicts.
Rather it's impulsiveness we're talking about. People who just want to have fun. And they're not going to move to Wichita or become fiscally prudent. They're not going to abandon parties and drugs and cool people for Netflix and sensible dinners and the conscientious.
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Can you describe - in a detailed manner - what it is like to be a person with 1) social IQ 1 SD above the mean, and in a bubble of same and 2) social IQ 1 SD below the mean, and in the same bubble? Are there "high-social-IQ" strategies that people are using that the socially impaired can't quite pull off? Social isolation is a kind of poverty trap and has the same dynamics.
I have no idea how to measure social IQ, EQ or whatever it's called.
I doubt social IQ bubbles even existed before the internet, various incel forums are probably the closest thing to one. Monasteries, maybe? High EQ monks would climb the hierarchy, becoming priors, abbots, hegumens and bishops, while the rest of the brethren would be content to toil and pray.
Hmm. Incel forums are one example. IRL...hmm. For low social IQ, engineering departments, maybe, although that's complicated by the fact that Aspies can socialize and network OK enough among themselves but flounder when interacting with normies. I've heard tales of technical departments with lots of sperg-engineers, a smaller number of half-sperg liasons, and then a bunch of normies using the sperg-engineers' products. Maybe MIT, half-jokingly described as the largest sheltered workshop for autists in the US, has some of these bubbles.
For high social-EQ bubbles? I'm pretty sure you can find lots of them in DC...lots of bushleague politician types and strivers looking to become more connected.
I specifically avoided mentioning places like MIT and FAANGs on one hand and NYT and various DC-adjacent think centers because they are high-IQ bubbles first and foremost.
They might be high-IQ bubbles...but MIT is not known for being full of socially astute individuals. Unlike DC. MIT's probably where you can find people long on IQ and short on EQ. DC's where you can find people with lots of both. Average IQ, low EQ - probably some kind of solitary tradesman or truck driver? Some kind of very concrete job, maybe where there's a shortage.
MIT isn't full of socially astute individuals, but it's not short of them either. Essentially, MIT filters for high-IQ (though to be more precise, its filter is a high baseline requirement for math aptitude and prior education--if you're not ready for a hardcore dive into calculus when you show up, you're in the wrong place).
There isn't much of a filter for social competence. You'll get stereotypical nerds who have issues with interpersonal obliviousness or maturity, but you'll also get cheerful, outgoing cheerleader-types who happen to like tutoring statistics and casually nailing at least a standard deviation above class average on their upper-division chemical engineering exams.
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I'm not saying you're wrong, I am saying MIT is not a typical community of low-EQ individuals because it's a community of high-IQ individuals. As you've said, duller low-EQ individuals were more likely to pick a solitary job and thus drift apart instead of drifting together before the Internet became mainstream and they realized they weren't the only one who hated that "people don't mean what they say and don't say what they mean".
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Yeah, I think that probably people who have severe mental issues are not even capable of walking a few blocks to fill out an application at a government office, or doing it over the phone or online. For them doing something like that is literally as difficult as it would be for me to go pass a test in quantum mechanics right now or climb Mt. Denali right now, given that I know almost nothing about quantum mechanics and have no background in mountain climbing.
Yeah, realistically speaking one would have to catch oneself in one's descent at the point when one still has enough money and mental clarity to be able to pull off the move to Cedar Rapids. But based on my personal experience, I can say that the thought of leaving the area you know and moving someplace you know almost nothing about and know nobody in, just because you cannot afford to stay where you currently are, is very daunting. For me the natural psychological tendency was to try to fight and struggle to stay where I was, and kinda hope that everything would work out somehow. The idea of moving to some other town where you know nobody, in this kind of mental state, can feel very scary and also can feel like a defeat. So I can imagine that some people probably do not actually muster up the willingness to move until they have already blown through too many resources to actually be able to make the move.
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